Grantham Amplification Fund

The Grantham Amplification Fund is aimed at providing initial seed funds to develop research, knowledge exchange and potential start-up projects that have a strong cross-disciplinary sustainability focus and propose practical solutions to complex problems. 

Successful applicants are awarded funding of anything between £1,000 and £75,000 across two schemes, which have different application criteria. Our expectation is that a successful conclusion will lead to a much larger 3rd party funding, or a significant real world impact amplifying the effect of the donation from the Grantham Foundation in building a sustainable future.

Applications to the fund are currently suspended due to the high volume of quality applications we have received. 

We are pleased to announce the successful projects that will receive funding from the latest round of our Grantham Amplification Fund initiative: 

Successful projects - 2025

Wildfire Detection with a Swarm of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles

Project lead: Professor Lyudmila Mihaylova 
Project description: A team from the University of Sheffield, led by Prof. Lyudmila Mihaylova, is developing AI-driven, vision-based algorithms for real-time wildfire detection and localisation using swarms of uncrewed aerial vehicles. Competing in the coveted XPRIZE Wildfire competition semifinals, Team AURA comprising the Universities of Sheffield and Bristol and Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service demonstrated this innovative system. University of Sheffield’s computer vision technology autonomously detects fires and smoke, while Bristol’s digital twin manages swarm control. The distributed AI-enabled UAV network enhances early wildfire detection, reduces carbon emissions, and supports firefighters. The project contributes towards impact and enhances the technology readiness level.

Development of Technology for Removing Forever Chemicals from Water

Project lead: Siddharth Patwardhan
Project description: We have developed a sustainable, scalable process to produce bioinspired mesoporous silica (BMS) with tunable pore sizes, low cost and low energy demand. BMS show strong potential for water treatment, especially removing harmful PFAS (“forever chemicals”), which are widespread, persistent and linked to serious health and environmental impacts. This project will combine market engagement, technical specification and experimental testing of BMS performance versus industry needs. It addresses two sustainability challenges: improving PFAS removal and creating greener, cheaper sorbents that are scalable compared to conventional materials. This project is inherently interdisciplinary, spanning materials science, chemistry, engineering, environmental science and business strategy to support successful market adoption. 

Low-Cost Benchtop Device for Accelerated Monitoring of Carbon Capture Through Enhanced Rock Weathering

Project leads: Isabella Steeley and Matthew Clements 
Project description: Enhanced Rock Weathering (EW) is a climate mitigation strategy that involves applying crushed silicate rocks to agricultural soils. As these rocks weather, atmospheric CO₂ is captured and stored. To scale EW, we must develop reliable methods to monitor carbon capture.
Magnetic separation is a novel approach using the magnetic properties of silicate rocks to recover them from the field and monitor weathering as a proxy for carbon capture. Currently, it is slow, labour-intensive, and prone to human error. This project aims to build an affordable magnetic separation machine to replace the manual process, accelerating the deployment of EW and contributing to global carbon removal efforts.

Solar Water Purification with Affordable Portable Device

Project lead: Julia Weinstein
Project description: Multiple communities world-wide have little access to clean water, with the climate crisis driving water deprivation further. UV-light disinfection is the only approved technology for final effluent disinfection, but is extremely energy intensive. 

This research is looking into reducing energy consumption by replacing the currently used energy-intensive UV-light (254nm) with visible light (400nm) by using a photosensitiser: a light-absorbing compound, which reacts with oxygen in water, producing bacteria-killing reactive oxygen species.

The team is constructing a small prototype device capable of disinfecting treated wastewater to industry standards and aims to complete a version of the device for household water purification.

Perceived vs Real Risk: Reconciling Community Perspectives with Tangible Climate Disruptions

Project lead: Giuliano Punzo 
Project description: Rare but highly disruptive events which are a consequence of extreme climate change (ECC) can shape people's risk perception and awareness. People’s perception is also moved by visible infrastructure investments too which reduce actual risk exposure. This research seeks to clarify the relationship between perceived and actual risk exposure to climate change informed by the Lloyds Register Foundation (LRF) World Risk Poll and major infrastructural interventions for adaptation. It will examine the data in both a cross-sectional way and longitudinally, looking at how major events (e.g. extreme droughts) or visible infrastructure change (e.g. dam construction) influence the climate change risk perception and awareness. This project is looking at near future collaboration with LRF aimed at understanding, hence reducing climate change related risk.

FORGE: Forest Governance through AI-enabled Evaluation of Species Mapping in the Peruvian Amazon

Project lead: Jefersson A. dos Santos 
Project description: The FORGE project will evaluate the effectiveness of algorithms in real-world forestry applications in collaboration with OSINFOR, the Peruvian institute responsible for supervising forest concessions. Using drone-based imagery and validated field data, the team will assess how well the models can support large-scale forest inventories, identify endangered species, and contribute to the monitoring of logging activities.

Foundations for Care Quality and Operational Resilience: A Pilot Study of Sustainable Heat Adaptation with Sheffield Teaching Hospitals

Project lead: Dr. Chengzhi Peng 
Project description: Extreme heat poses an urgent threat to NHS care delivery, with approximately 90% of hospital buildings in England vulnerable to overheating. This risk jeopardises patient safety, disrupts services, and strains infrastructure not designed for rising temperatures. 
This foundational pilot study, co-designed with Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, aims to achieve three objectives:
1. Robust, data-intensive building energy and thermal comfort modelling. 
2. To run co-production focus groups for qualitative assessment. 
3. Industry-led feasibility studies on implementing sustainable ventilative cooling solutions in specialist and general NHS hospitals.

Negotiating Sustainable AI: Policies and Lived Experiences of the Socio-Ecological Impacts of AI Infrastructures in India and Mexico

Project leads: Dr. Preeti Raghunath and Dr. Itzelle Aurora Medina-Perea 
Project description: This project examines the societal and ecological implications of AI infrastructure development in India and Mexico, focusing on AI policies, and the lived experiences of individuals and communities living amidst the development of data centres. The research will pose the following questions: 

How does social and ecological sustainability feature in AI policy initiatives in India and Mexico? 

What are the lived experiences of individuals and communities who are affected by the material and social infrastructures of AI (e.g. land acquisition, water availability, environmental clearances and labour laws) in India and Mexico?

“Water Blew Up Everything” - An Urban History of Climate Disasters in Buenos Aires’ Informal Settlements

Project lead: Adriana Laura Massidda
Project description: This project seeks to understand the ways in which urban poverty and ecological vulnerability intersect in cities from the vantage point of urban environmental history. Focusing on local experience, the project addresses a specific event — the 1967 flood — and an area strongly affected by it — the Buenos Aires floodplains, Argentina — to carefully reconstruct the intertwined narratives that emerge from residents’ accounts in contrast to official discourse.

The exhibition engages a wide array of sources including oral history, press coverage, government documents and grassroots photography repositories. It is structured across key themes that emerge from these sources, articulated through residents’ voices.

Who can apply?

The fund is available to any academics, research staff or professional service members at the University of Sheffield. Please note, the Principal Investigator has to be from the University of Sheffield but other collaborators on the project can be from other institutions.

Project applications should evidence meaningful interdisciplinarity  as a core focus, involving academic and  non-academic stakeholders where appropriate. The application should clearly demonstrate how this funding will deliver significant impact, attract further investment or create new knowledge that otherwise would not be possible. 

Funding criteria 

The funding award can be used as part of a wider grant application where permissible as match funding where permitted by the ultimate funder, contribute to a larger project budget or to fund a project in its entirety. Applicants should detail how this money will deliver a wider benefit, either through its part in a larger grant award or the effect of the research in terms of deliverable, demonstrable planetary or societal benefits.

The funding can be used to cover research costs such as arranging of meetings, travel costs, and associated items, and 3rd party revenue costs such as specialist licences for software or databases. Capital costs, such as specialist equipment, may be exceptionally considered on a case by case basis, but the applicant must show a wider benefit to the research community of the procurement of equipment. Rental, reuse or repurposing will always be preferred to the purchase of new. 

The awards are not intended to be used as bridging funds, stipend top ups or to extend contracts of staff on grants close to completion.  

We would not normally fund air travel where there were rail alternatives, and we will not fund projects associated directly with the tobacco or arms industries and will only consider the oil and gas sector where decarbonisation and defossilisation is the explicit goal. Priority will be given to those who have not been awarded monies from this fund previously.

Funding stipulations

The recipients will be required to acknowledge the support of the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures in any papers produced from the work and must submit a report detailing the project progress for use in the Grantham Centre annual report in January of each year of the project's duration. A separate financial report will be required to track the spend against the award on a quarterly basis in the first 12 months.

Recipients will also be required to work with our Communications Officer to create some promotional materials about the project.

Applicants must detail any time constraints in their application.
 

Eligible costs:

• Directly incurred staff time (e.g. research assistant, PDRA, technician, administrator time)
• Directly allocated staff costs by exception
• Travel and subsistence costs
• Market analysis
• Prototyping
• Access to facilities
• Specialist support by 3rd parties
• Equipment (can include specialist software / hardware, excludes laptops)

Ineligible costs:

• Estates and indirect costs
• All projects will be assessed value for money
   

How to apply

Please note:  Applications to the fund are currently suspended due to the high volume of quality applications we have received

If you have any questions or require more information, please contact grantham@sheffield.ac.uk